


Why Memory Alpha is wrong about B’Elanna’s age

by 70thousandlightyearsfromhome (ShayneyL)



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Archived From 70000 Light Years From Home Blog, Archived From Tumblr, Character Ages, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Gen, Meta Essay, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-13 19:13:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20587628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShayneyL/pseuds/70thousandlightyearsfromhome
Summary: This is nonfiction. If you are looking for fanfic, keep scrolling!How old is B'Elanna Torres?  I touched on this in my previous post aboutVoyagercrew ages.  Here, I go into more detail.Memory Alpha is a great resource...but it's often wrong.  It's the nature of wikis.  Anyone can post anything, and people are sometimes mistaken.  I think Memory Alpha is dead wrong about B'Elanna's age, and here's why.





	Why Memory Alpha is wrong about B’Elanna’s age

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted at my blog, [70,000 Light Years From Home](https://70thousandlightyearsfromhome.tumblr.com/).
> 
> I came across [this post](https://inu-fiction.tumblr.com/post/180627911671/psa-stuff-you-maybe-didnt-realize-you-can-back) at Tumblr awhile back. It points out that AO3 is for fan_works_, not just fanfic. And that the future of Tumblr is uncertain, and so archiving references/analysis to AO3 is a good idea.

☾ ⋆*･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ: *⋆.*:･ﾟ .: ⋆*･ﾟ: .⋆｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

Garrett Wang, who played Harry Kim, has often said that he thought Harry and B’Elanna (played by Roxann Dawson) might end up together. He called it an “older woman/younger man” thing. That was certainly true of Roxann and Garrett; she’s 10 years older than he is. But what about their characters? Was B’Elanna older than Harry? I say she was.

According to Memory Alpha, [B’Elanna Torres](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/B%27Elanna_Torres) was born the same year as [Harry Kim](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Harry_Kim): 2349. That is contrary to the information we are given in the aired episodes.

The "Caretaker" script describes B'Elanna as being in her "mid-twenties," while Harry is in his "early twenties." The Voyager bible (writers’ guide) listed Harry’s age in “Caretaker” as 22, and B’Elanna as being about 25. Now, that's not canon, unless the information in it makes it into the aired episodes…but in this case, the writers pretty consistently wrote B’Elanna as being 3-4 years older than Harry, even if they never explicitly gave her age. Probably because of the information in the bible.

We know Harry Kim is 22 years old in the first season. In "Eye of the Needle,“ Tom comments that 20 years ago, Harry was just 2 years old. Which fits in with his being fresh out of the Academy. Twenty-two is the age you expect someone to be when they’re right out of college. 

"Equinox” shows us that B’Elanna is older than Harry. It’s explicitly stated that they’ve been in the Delta Quadrant for five years. B'Elanna says she and her Academy sweetheart, Max, broke up “over 10 years ago.” Harry is 27 in “Equinox” (22+5). “Over 10 years ago” he would have been in high school, or younger. (5 years on Voyager + 4 years at Starfleet Academy + 1 year of high school = 10 years. Ten years ago, Harry was a junior in high school.)

In “Extreme Risk,” B’Elanna says she was 19 when she got kicked out of Starfleet. That fits in with her leaving in her second year. Nineteen is the usual age of a college sophomore, so B’Elanna was the normal age for a cadet. 

So, the timeline given in “Equinox” fits with her being 3-4 years older than Harry. If she is 30-31 in “Equinox,” and she broke up with Max when she was 19, that is “over 10 years ago.”

More confirmation…. Though young B’Elanna’s age isn’t explicitly given in “Lineage,” it’s strongly implied that she is 12 when she last saw her father. (We’ll ignore the fact that she’s previously said she was 5 or 6; she is clearly older than that.) B’Elanna creates a simulation of what her daughter will look like at age 12 — presumably because that’s the age she was when her dad decided she was “too Klingon.”

In “Author, Author,” she finally sees her dad again. He tells her, “I know I can’t make up for twenty years in one conversation.”

If B'Elanna was 12 when her dad left them, and that was 20 years ago, that makes her 32 in “Author, Author.” Harry would be 28 in season 7 - four years younger than B'Elanna.

So, why does at least one fan (whoever edited that birth year onto Torres’ page) think she’s the same age as Harry? Near as I can figure…it’s because of [Daniel Byrd/Bird](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Daniel_Byrd). Harry’s best friend from the Academy was named Danny Byrd (”Non Sequitur”). The boy who tormented B’Elanna in grammar school (“Juggernaut”) was Daniel Bird. (Spelling from the closed captioning.) Someone assumed they are the same person, and that Harry and B’Elanna are therefore the same age.

The real-world explanation is probably that the name comes from a real-life person connected to Trek. (Behind the scenes employee, friend of a writer, something like that. Minor characters in Trek often got their names that way.) And because of the different spelling, the assistant whose job it was to make sure the name hadn’t been used before didn’t catch it. 

There’s a couple of in-universe explanations that make a lot more sense than assuming Harry and B’Elanna are the same age. Like, maybe Bird and Byrd are different people. There’s presumably billions if not trillions of people in the Federation; no doubt some of them have the same name. (And in this case, it’s not the same name. They’re spelled differently.) If you really must have Harry’s best friend be the same person as the boy who bullied B’Elanna, it’s more logical to assume that he was old for a cadet — maybe took awhile to decide he wanted to join Starfleet — than to assume Harry and B’Elanna are the same age.


End file.
